Please read Howard Kurtz's article and then submit your questions.

Bethesda, Maryland: I'm especially interested in the report that James Cramer apparently bought into last week's hoax involving Emulex, where a false press release posted to the Net helped drive the company's stock down significantly. Is there anything regulators can do to force commentators to exercise "due diligence" before posting messages based on information gathered from the Web?

Howard Kurtz: Actually, my book has another example of savvy trader Cramer falling for a hoax. But the rapid-fire willingness of Bloomberg, CNBC, Dow Jones et al. to trumpet a bogus press release without checking it out underscores all that is wrong in the world of the fortune tellers. You say "due diligence" -- how about making a single phone call? One call would have produced a denial that would give any reporter pause. But in this world it's publish first, ask questions later.

nyc, ny: is there still a chance that dot-com companies will be trendy again?

Howard Kurtz: I doubt the dot-com sector will ever be trendy again because memories of the painful crash of last April are just too raw. But some high-tech stocks or sectors ( ie, biotechnology) will surely be. Market mavens care only about what's going up. When Amazon stock was on fire, no one particularly cared that the company had lost more than a billion dollars or that its business plan was controversial at best. Jeff Bezos was Time's man of the year. Now that Amazon stock has dropped by 2/3, Wall Street's view is very different.

Mt. Rainier: Does it seem to you that very many of these financial gurus have an extremely limited focus? Mr. Kramer not only doesn't have a social context for what he does, he doesn't seem to have a market-wide context. I guess 'naive' is the best word for him? I find it a little scary that the people with the most influence on the market seem to have no idea what they are doing to society at large. Or even that there IS a society out there?

Howard Kurtz: Jim Cramer is actually a guy who knows a lot about the rest of the world -- media, sports, even politics -- and peppers his columns with references to the World Beyond Wall Street. But many of the people I dealt with are so wrapped up in the money-making universe that they're barely aware there's an election going on. It's an all-consuming, high-stakes world with enormous amounts of pressure, so perhaps it's not surprising that some tend to be monomaniacal.

silver spring md: is cramer still hosting that web site

Howard Kurtz: Cramer is still a star columnist for (and majority stockholder in) TheStreet.com. That site is now free, so they've spun off a second site, RealMoney.com, where you can read Cramer's trading diary in real time rather than on a delayed basis. He also writes a financial column for New York magazine.

los angeles: what do you think of the charge that cnbc is overly bullish and not that objective.

Howard Kurtz: CNBC journalists work very hard and try to be objective. When the market is sinking, they're sometimes accused of being too bearish. But the very premise of CNBC is that if you watch the different experts being paraded on the air, you'll pick up tips on all these great stocks and make loads of money. The problem is that these experts are often wrong and some of them have conflicts of interest in pushing stocks they own or, if they're analysts, stocks of companies their own banking firms do business with. And CNBC, like other news outlets, sometimes gets swept up in reporting rumors on the theory that rumors move the market.

Philly, PA: How did you get access to Cramer if he's so monomaniacal, as you said? Was it a ego thing (Wash. Post is gonna write about me) or , for lack of a better phrase, professional courtesy?

What is he like in real life?

Howard Kurtz: He is in real life exactly as he comes off in the book -- a wild and crazy guy (and a very smart one) who wears his emotions on his sleeve. He is by far the most fascinating character I've ever written about. If you look at all his TV appearances, punditry, etc., he's not exactly publicity-shy. But as with my other books, you build up relationships with people over time and they come to trust you. I persuaded Cramer that I would be fair and he thinks I was, even though I'm hard on him in several areas.

Tacoma, WA.: Old adage: what goes up will come down. Is Cramer a hedge fund or a stock picker ?
asghar shah

Howard Kurtz: Well, his primary responsibility is to his hedge-fund clients (mostly high rollers). He bets against stocks (by shorting them) almost as often as he tries to pick winners. Sometimes he puts half the fund's money in cash if he doesn't like the way the market is going. But ultimately it is about stock picking, about making judgments about companies based on a thousand shards of information. This is risky business -- Cramer's fund was up only a couple of percent in 1998, but a rip-roaring 63 percent last year.

los angeles, ca: With online -- and even, off-line -- journalism operations increasingly being folded into publicly traded corporations, can we still expect journalists to maintain their financial neutrality by not owning stock? Or should they now be allowed to own chunks of the companies, and their competitors, that they write about?

Howard Kurtz: A fascinating question. Most journalists aren't allowed to write about stocks (or companies) they own. One exception is at Microsoft's MoneyCentral site, where the top columnist touts some stocks he owns. Cramer's argument is that while he's not a pure journalist -- he's a trader -- his writing has more resonance than that of a stay-on-the-sidelines reporter because he's in the trenches and risking his own money. That's okay, I suppose, if you disclose which stocks you own, as Cramer does, though he did get into hot water five years ago when the disclosure line was dropped in one of his magazine columns.

Phoenix, AZ: Is it true that Cramer and Microsoft President Ballmer were together at Harvard and knew each other. At Crimson ?

I have read him ever since TheStreet.com was founded and find him refreshingly fresh and honest, and witty. He's helped me a lot to understand how the wall street operates, and to anticipate market events.

Howard Kurtz: I do seem to recall that Cramer and Steve Ballmer knew each other at Harvard. May not have been the Crimson -- I think they were roommates. Cramer is a witty guy, and people seem to either love him or hate him. I'll say one thing for him -- unlike most of the gurus I write about in The Fortune Tellers, he openly admits his mistakes, even advertises them, rather than posing as an all-knowing seer. That, as it happens, makes for interesting reading.

St. John, U.S.Virgin Islands: Some online stock bulletin board posters are more knowledgable than "Media personalities" such as Cramer.
Many have in depth knowledge of a specific company and are watched by many "lurkers ".

Do you see any chance of these unpaid posters as ever gaining the stature of media pros? (Just wanted to ask a question) Looking forward to your book!

Howard Kurtz: Thanks! A lot of amateur and not-so-amateur stock pickers have developed an online following. The problem is figuring out who's good and who's not -- and, more importantly, avoding people who are simply trying to run up the price of stock they own or bash a stock they've shorted. The SEC is very interested in this, and a couple of indictments have been brought. But I think do-it-yourselfers will always have a niche following. (Cramer, by the way, is a fulltime trader who happens to have an amazingly high media profile.)

Washington DC: What do you think about Cramer abilities to value companies - if he is in so much trouble over overvalualing his own company why would he be any better in making decisions for his hedge fund?

Howard Kurtz: Well, he'd point to his 63 percent return last year. Cramer actually takes home the corporate research reports and tries to figure what these outfits are, or should be, worth. But the dot-com frenzy got so intense last year that he repeatedly complained that the market didn't care any more about the intrinsic worth of companies, that it was all momentum investing and chasing the latest overpriced Net stock. Now actually figuring out whether a company can make profits seems to have come back into style.

Silver Spring, MD: I'm interested in magazines and journals with critical analyses of Wall Street - not just what's up and what's down, who are the players, etc., but more in terms of the effects on the rest of the country and world. Could you give me some leads?

Howard Kurtz: Two writers I like are James Surowiecki, who does a weekly financial column for the New Yorker, and Rob Walker, the "Moneybox" column at Slate.com. Another I like, for his fiercely contrarian approach, is Chris Byron of the New York Observer and MSNBC (who's also a player in my book.)

Takoma Park: A follow-up to the question from Mt. Rainer: what interests me is not so much that these guys seem to have little focus outside their own little financial world; it's that, like day traders, their moves seem to depend on reading everyone else's mind -- how's that CNBC report gonna play? -- and acting an instant ahead of the pack. Anyone's economic theory of why stock pickers are worth the zillions of dollars they make is based on the fact or argument that they learn a lot about businesses and the economy and then take buy or sell actions that cause capital to be moved to more productive uses. (That would be the justification for the remuneration paid to Sanford Weill, who by coincidence is on the cover of the NYT Magazine on the same day that Cramer is on the cover of the WP.) But what is Cramer learning that causes capital to flow in more productive directions? Nothing that I can see. He's just trying to figure out what everyone else will do, and do it first.

Howard Kurtz: Sure, but that's the essence of stock trading. It's a minute by minute world. And a crazy-quilt one, in which what matters is not whether Amazon or AOL or Yahoo reported a 50 percent increase in quarterly profits, but whether they beat the consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts by a penny a share. And whether the "good news" is already built into the stock price. And whether the CEO is going to be on CNBC the next morning. Questions about the allocation of capital are important, but not for the fortune tellers who operate in real time.

Scotts Valley, CA: Regarding the wild ride of Mr Cramer: So, it takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity. This story makes it sound that the markets can't be trusted. It's a wild ride that even the "experts" can't really understand. Building Rome is not the task of a day. But when the American GNP is growing at the pace it's been at, Rome can be built in just a few years. My question: Is the establishment (i.e., banking and corporate America) really afaid of sustained GNP of 5-6 % annually. It seems that A. Greenspan is really more worried about the expanding GNP and it's sustained growth than inflation. Remember that just a few years ago the GNP's growth could only be expanded 1-3 percent annually. This is still an economic axiom taught in most or all universities. A. Greenspan spoke only last week that this "phenomenon" was a strange anomaly, and it will perhaps go away. Comment please, on what this fear is all about. My feeling is that this market will continue to go up and it's not really strange at all. We're building on the shoulders of many Romes before us. ADB

Howard Kurtz: Wall Street is constantly terrified of the merest hint of inflation. A few wrong (if ambiguous) words from Mr. Greenspan and the markets plummet out of a concern for another interest rate hike by the Fed. It's not that "the markets" don't work -- it's that they have a hair-trigger fear of rate hikes. I've watched CNBC on mornings when the latest unemployment figures drop by a tenth of a percent -- good news in the "real" world -- and Wall Streeters dump stocks because they're worried that more people working could lead to more inflation, thus spooking the Fed.

Scotts Valley, CA: Regarding the wild ride of Mr Cramer: So, it takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity. This story makes it sound that the markets can't be trusted. It's a wild ride that even the "experts" can't really understand. Building Rome is not the task of a day. But when the American GNP is growing at the pace it's been at, Rome can be built in just a few years. My question: Is the establishment (i.e., banking and corporate America) really afaid of sustained GNP of 5-6 % annually. It seems that A. Greenspan is really more worried about the expanding GNP and it's sustained growth than inflation. Remember that just a few years ago the GNP's growth could only be expanded 1-3 percent annually. This is still an economic axiom taught in most or all universities. A. Greenspan spoke only last week that this "phenomenon" was a strange anomaly, and it will perhaps go away. Comment please, on what this fear is all about. My feeling is that this market will continue to go up and it's not really strange at all. We're building on the shoulders of many Romes before us. ADB

Howard Kurtz: Wall Street is constantly terrified of the merest hint of inflation. A few wrong (if ambiguous) words from Mr. Greenspan and the markets plummet out of a concern for another interest rate hike by the Fed. It's not that "the markets" don't work -- it's that they have a hair-trigger fear of rate hikes. I've watched CNBC on mornings when the latest unemployment figures drop by a tenth of a percent -- good news in the "real" world -- and Wall Streeters dump stocks because they're worried that more people working could lead to more inflation, thus spooking the Fed.

Annapolis MD: Whatattracted you to write the article?
Was it the inherent conflict of interest?
Article indicates he made disclosure of his --trading? holdings in a particular stock that he may have been discussing? Traders go in and out so fast and with other managers of the hedge fund involved (i.e. partner) I doubt he could keep track

Howard Kurtz: The article is an excerpt from my book "The Fortune Tellers." I was increasingly fascinated by this manic subculture of Wall Street at a time when half the country is now invested in the market. I was equally interested in the clout of the most powerful journalists on the Street, what their lives are like, how they get their information, what kind of pressure they operate under. It turns out that financial reporters are players who, with a single report, can instantly slice billions off a company's net worth. Far more influential than in any other realm of journalism.

Gaithersburg: May I ask what's so great about 63% return in 1999? Doesn't he put most of his money into stocks on the NASDAQ, which returned 86%?

Howard Kurtz: Don't know about you, but I'd be happy to get a 63 percent return every year.
Besides, you can't buy the entire Nasdaq, so getting the 86 percent rise of 1999 depended on some level of stock picking. Plus, while the Nasdaq has plunged in recent months, Cramer's fund is still posting a healthy return (which could change). Index funds are a perfectly reasonable way to invest in the market, but they're not going to bring you a 63 percent return.

Marblehead, Ma.: Does Cramer accept any "big-picture" responsibility for helping to create a casino-like atmosphere in our public financial markets?

Howard Kurtz: Jim Cramer's view is that he didn't create the casino, he just has to live within its rules. For example, he criticizes those who make bets based on CNBC, or on the latest round of rumors, but he does the same thing when he thinks it can make him money. He's a leading cardinal in the market's religion, which is the Church of Whatever Works.